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Former Vice President Joe Biden’s White House victory was powered by a broad and racially diverse coalition of voters driven to the polls by fierce opposition to President Donald Trump and anxiety over a surging, deadly pandemic. After four years of p…
November 7, 2020Read More
Joe Biden is promising to take the country on a very different path from what it has seen over the past four years under President Donald Trump, on issues ranging from the coronavirus and health care to the environment, education and more. The Democra…
November 7, 2020Read More
World leaders congratulated U.S. President-elect Joe Biden on his victory, cheering it as an opportunity to fortify global democracy and celebrating the significance of Americans having their first female vice president. Although President Donald Trum…
November 7, 2020Read More
Biden has shown an interest in multilateral diplomacy similar to previous Democratic administrations. In Iran, that path could include a partnered approach between Washington and Europe, similar to a deal struck under Obama’s administration.
November 7, 2020Read More
With coronavirus cases running rampant in the Dakotas and elected leaders refusing to forcefully intervene, the burden of pushing people to take the virus seriously has increasingly been put on the families of those who have died. In the Dakotas, the …
November 7, 2020Read More
As Election Day ground on into “election week,” it became increasingly clear that Democrat Joe Biden would oust President Donald Trump from the White House. Late-counted ballots in Nevada, Pennsylvania and Georgia continued to keep Biden in the lead a…
November 7, 2020Read More
One of three remaining fighters in the French resistance to the Nazi occupation of World War II has died, President Emmanuel Macron’s office said Friday, hailing a “hero” who was just 17 when he joined the fight to free France. Pierre Simonet, who died Thursday aged 99, was one of just over a thousand resistance fighters decorated by Charles de Gaulle, who rallied the defeated French forces from London after Germany’s 1940 invasion of the country. His death comes a few months after that of another wartime hero, Edgard Tupet-Thome, leaving just two men as living links to one of the most wrenching chapters in France’s history. “The president honours the life of this man driven by the love of liberty who, transcending risks and borders, was always guided by his immense love of France,” the Elysee said in a statement released shortly after midnight. Born in Hanoi before arriving with his family in France when he was five, Simonet used his maths skills to help form artillery battalions for the Free French Forces (FFL), before becoming a spotter during Operation Dragoon that debarked for the Italy campaign in 1944. By the end of the war, “he had chalked up 250 flight hours and 137 missions, earning him five distinctions and his designation as a Companion of the Liberation on December 27, 1945,” the presidency said. In June 1945, as a huge crowd gathered for a victory parade on the Champs-Elysee in Paris, Simonet had an idea to mark the occasion that would earn him a cherished place in aviation history. After flying over the famed avenue in his Piper Cub, Simonet asked his fellow flyers: “How about we go underneath the Eiffel Tower?” Wisely not asking his superiors for permission, Simonet and the others carried off the feat to the astonishment of onlookers. “For us, rebels from the first hour, we had to do something out of the ordinary,” he said in a 2015 interview. Mr Simonet would go on to have a long career in international public service, including roles at the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
November 7, 2020Read More
Under a system that’s been tweaked over two centuries, there is still a weekslong timeline during which the 538-member Electoral College picks the president. — When American citizens vote for a presidential candidate, they really are voting for electo…
November 7, 2020Read More
The president’s bid to crown himself king will be his last reality show * Biden styled himself as the antithesis to bare-knuckled Trumpism – and won * Thomas Frank: ‘Ding-dong, the jerk is gone. But read this before you sing the Hallelujah Chorus’On 20 January 2021, Joseph R Biden Jr will take the oath of office as the 46th president of the United States. The crucial deciding votes will long have been counted. Challenges in the courts will have been dismissed. His victory in the election will not have been in doubt.While the irresolution of election night seemed to hold the possibility of repeating the trauma of 2016, when all the ballots are finally counted Biden’s victory will represent a substantial rejection of Donald Trump. > Trump speaks of the supreme court as his personal instrument, like he talks of ‘my generals’Early in the morning after the election, after Trump tweeted, “A big WIN!”, he stepped before the Klieg lights at the White House to make good on his promise not to accept the judgment of the voters if he might lose. He staged his own coronation by press conference. “This is a fraud on the American public, this is an embarrassment to our country, we were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election,” he proclaimed. He acted as though he could wave away the votes that were still being counted, just as votes have always been counted in the hours and days after an election. Trump declared: “We’ll be going to the US supreme court – we want all voting to stop.”Trump speaks of the supreme court as his personal instrument, like he talks of “my generals”, as when he ordered Gen Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, to march in uniform in his Praetorian Guard through the teargas aimed at racial justice demonstrators in Lafayette Park, across from the White House, to stand in front of St John’s Church brandishing a Bible whipped from Ivanka Trump’s Max Mara handbag.“I think this will end up in the supreme court,” Trump said last month about the election when he appointed Amy Coney Barrett, the rightwing ideologue, to the court. The justices are expected to perform as employees of the Trump Organization. Even if he cannot force them to sign non-disclosure agreements, which he imposes on White House staff, he expects more than the three on whom he has bestowed his favor by naming them to the court to demonstrate their unswerving loyalty and maintain his power.The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe sent a team to view the American election, a routine exercise they have performed nine previous times. But this time they were shocked by what they observed. “Nobody – no politician, no elected official, nobody – should limit the people’s right to vote,” said Michael Georg Link, a member of the German parliament who led the group. “Baseless allegations of systematic deficiencies, notably by the incumbent president, including on election night, harm public trust in democratic institutions.”Trump’s actions to stop or suspend the counting of votes and to certify the results is precisely the classic transgression for which the US has rebuked tinpot dictators, including in the state department’s annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. Trump’s call specifically flies in the face of Article 23 (b) of the American Convention on Human Rights, of the Organization of American States, to which the US is a signatory, which guarantees the right “to vote and to be elected in genuine periodic elections, which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and by secret ballot that guarantees the free expression of the will of the voters”.Trump’s election suppression effort bears a curious and striking similarity to that of the lunatic “magician” president of the Gambia, Yahya Jammeh, who in 2016 rejected the results of an election he lost, called for it to be nullified, and appealed to judges he appointed to the supreme court to rescue him. Awaiting their ruling, he deployed troops in the capital. Like Trump, he attacked freedom of the press, demonized migrants, was accused of sexually assaulting women, and advocated snake-oil remedies for diseases. Under the pressure of international condemnation, including from the African Union and the United Nations security council, he was forced to give up the presidency and flee.On Wednesday afternoon, 4 November, minutes before the Wisconsin elections commission announced that Biden had won the state, Trump’s campaign filed a court complaint demanding a recount. He has also called for stopping the vote counting in Pennsylvania and Georgia, where he was momentarily ahead, and to continue the counting in Nevada and Arizona, where he was behind.Trump may ultimately try to hang his cases on the infamous Bush v Gore decision that handed the presidency by US supreme court fiat to George W Bush. In the contested Florida recount of 2000, the court ruled that the Florida supreme court had exceeded its authority in interpreting state law by calling for a statewide recount. The ruling written by Antonin Scalia cited the 14th amendment’s equal protection clause, asserting that recounting the votes would cause “irreparable harm” to Bush by casting “a needless and unjustified cloud” over his legitimate election. He also stated that Bush v Gore should never be considered as a precedent for any future decision. Later, he privately confessed that his opinion was, “as we say in Brooklyn, a piece of shit”.> If Trump is hanging the election outcome on Bush v Gore, it is a slender reed that depends upon the counting of the votesThree of the lawyers working for the Bush campaign in the Florida contest now sit on the supreme court: John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. The week before the election, on 26 October, Kavanaugh repeatedly cited Bush v Gore in a “shadow docket” case, Democratic National Committee v Wisconsin state legislature, which vacated a federal appeals court decision that had extended a ballot deadline in Wisconsin. As though he had coordinated with the Trump campaign, Kavanaugh translated its talking points into his concurrence, arguing against counting votes past election night because there would be “chaos and suspicions of impropriety … if thousands of absentee ballots flow in after election day and potentially flip the results of an election”. (Justice Elena Kagan pointed out the absurdity of Kavanaugh’s illogic: there could be no election result to “flip” until the ballots were counted.)If Trump is hanging the outcome of the election on Bush v Gore, it is a slender, brittle reed that, regardless of the fact that it was never supposed to be cited again, depends upon the counting of the votes in the first place.One after another, the states’ ballots will be counted. The results will be known. They will be certified. And Biden will be declared the winner. Trump’s attempt to crown himself king will be his last failed reality show. Instead, he will be the first president since Benjamin Harrison to have lost the popular vote for president twice, the first time paradoxically as the winner but the second as the natural loser. Trump will soon be, as the poet Wallace Stevens wrote, “the Emperor of Ice Cream”. * Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth
November 7, 2020Read More
Democratic candidate Joe Biden has won the U.S. presidential election, major U.S. news outlets are projecting.CNN, NBC and USA Today were among the outlets that have projected a win for the former vice president in the battleground state of Pennsylvania. That would give Biden 273 Electoral College votes, putting him just past the 270 threshold needed to win the election.The Associated Press pegs the current tally at 290 for Biden and 214 for U.S. President Donald Trump.Trump, however, has not conceded and is unlikely to anytime soon. In a statement released shortly after the projections of Biden’s victory, he said: “We all know why Joe Biden is rushing to falsely pose as the winner, and why his media allies are trying so hard to help him: they don’t want the truth to be exposed. The simple fact is this election is far from over.” He went on to accuse the Biden campaign of counting illegal ballots and threatened legal action in the week ahead. His statement is in line with sweeping conspiracy theories the president promoted in a press conference on Thursday, without evidence. Trump’s tweets were flagged multiple times by Twitter Thursday for containing misinformation about the election. At one point the president tweeted “STOP THE COUNT!” in all caps. “It’s time for America to unite. And to heal,” Biden said in a statement following the projections. “With the campaign over, it’s time to put the anger and the harsh rhetoric behind us and come together as a nation.” He is expected to give a national address Saturday night. An Election Like No Other: Americans chose the next president in an election held during a raging coronavirus pandemic, with millions of absentee ballots upending previous timelines for vote counting and results.The president himself contracted the virus during the campaign, announcing his diagnosis on Twitter and spending several days at Walter Reed Medical Center. A false victory claim by Trump early Wednesday; baseless accusations of election fraud; litigation, including lawsuits thrown out by judges in Michigan and Georgia; and skirmishes at vote counting locations in Detroit and Phoenix lent an air of instability to the country’s core democratic process this week.The stock market this week rallied on the rising prospects for a Democrat-led White House and Republican-led Senate. The resulting gridlock would put the brakes on sweeping Democratic changes, namely a potential increase in taxes and regulation.The three major U.S. indexes recorded their best week of trading since April. The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 6.87% during the week, opening with 26,787.65 and closing at 28,323.40. The NASDAQ Composite Index started the week at 11,001.70 and closed it at 11,895.23, growing by 9, 01%. The S&P 500 gained 7.32% over the week, closing at 3,509.44.The Incoming Biden-Harris Administration: Biden, 77, served as a U.S. senator from Delaware from 1973 to 2009 before becoming vice president under President Barack Obama for two terms.In 2017, Obama presented Biden with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.Kamala Harris, 56, will be the first female and the first African American to hold the office of vice president in U.S. history. Harris served as California’s attorney general before her election to the U.S. Senate in 2016.What’s Ahead For Biden: The most urgent priority facing the Biden administration is unquestionably the coronavirus, a pandemic downplayed by Trump that is surging nationally in a second wave of infections and that has led to historic economic contraction and job losses. The U.S. hit more than 120,000 daily cases for the first time on Thursday and then hit nearly 130,000 on Friday, according to Reuters.More than 9.8 million Americans have become infected this year and more than 237,000 have died.Biden is returning to a White House rocked by the scandals of an impeached president whose family members have been intertwined with his official duties and who has made name-calling and the daily uttering of lies hallmarks of his presidency.On the world stage, Trump has often shown warmth toward strongmen such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, turning the post-World War II foreign policy of the U.S. upside down.Trump was impeached late last year by the House of Representatives on articles of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, accused of interfering with a House investigation of Trump’s request to the Ukranian president to investigate Biden and his son Hunter.Dustin Blitchok contributed to this story.Benzinga file photo by Dustin Blitchok. See more from Benzinga * Click here for options trades from Benzinga * Berkshire Hathaway Reports Q3 Earnings, Record .3B Stock Buyback(C) 2020 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.
November 7, 2020Read More
Donald Trump, who defied political gravity with his extraordinary rise from reality star and businessman to the presidency, has fallen back to earth. “Even in defeat, Donald Trump has exceeded expectations and helped other Republicans do the same,” sa…
November 7, 2020Read More
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